8.6
Some Questions Directed to the Authors of the “Bamako Appeal”

[Dorothea Haerlin (ATTAC Germany, dorotheahaerlin@gmx.de) on WSFDiscuss, April 28 2006 resulting from an initial, quite controversial debate about the “Bamako Appeal” in the reading circle of the ATTAC Cafe Berlin, the discussion among them continues.
@ http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=149]

Preface: Putting the Appeal in the Context of the Current Debate about the Future of the WSF.

After 6 years experience with the World Social Forum process, discussions about the future of the forum are intensifying. For many forum participants the shift to the left n the presidential elections in Latin American raised the additional question about the relationship between social movements and governments, especially at the continental WSF in Caracas 2006, in which President Chavez took an important although not completely dominating role. In his speech at the concluding meeting of the Assembly of Social Movements one of his explicit proposals was “that the movements should enter into a “strategic alliance” with progressive governments, and he called on the forum to integrate itself into the “cultural revolution of the people”, which he had proclaimed. And some people, particularly from the generation which founded the forum, supported this embrace.”…There was also a very concrete proposal among their ranks… “To create a data bank with the addresses of activists from the thousands of grassroots organizations and social movements existing world wide, in order to develop joint plans and actions. Others, among them prominent representatives of the powerful Brazilian organizations, want to preserve an independent position that also confronts leftist governments critically. A stance which also results from experiences with more than three years with Lula's government. Accordingly, there are heated discussions going on about future development in the highest body of the Forum, the International Council (in which some 160 organizations are represented). Some want to establish it as a political figure with clear positions; it should become involved and provide orientation. Others want to preserve it as a place in which the anti-neoliberal and anti-imperial resistance and alternatives can connect together. Two positions which represent this. Emir Sadar, the influential Brazilian leftist intellectual took a clear position: Today, alternatives are being formulated by the progressive governments and not by the WSF. Gilberto López Ribas, former representative of the PRD (Partido de la Revolución) from Mexico, a participant in the “Other Campaign” of “Delgado Zero” (as sub-commandant Marcos calls himself today) has a very different opinion. The social movements should not trust any institutional change on principle. For him the corruption of governing parties is destined, and is structurally conditioned. And for him experience has proved that when one enters into the institutions one ends up reproducing the system.” (quoted after Stefan Thimmel, “Strategic Alliances” of Movements and Leftist Governments? In “ila” Nr.293, March 2006)

The “Bamako Appeal” was made public within this discussion process, which was sketched quite accurately by Stefan Thimmel, on 1.18.2006, one day before the start of the African part of the WSF - decentralised this year - in Bamako, with the request for debate in the various groups of the social movement and possible later signing.

Therefore I have some questions directed to the authors of the “Bamako Appeal”

First some formal questions:

1. Who participated in the drafting of the text and how were they invited?

2. What role did the Appeal play at the Forum in Bamako and in the events concerning the future of the WSF? (As participant in the Assembly of Social Movements at the WSF in Caracas, I can report that the Appeal was mentioned there and acclaimed, without having been presented to the participants in its entirety.)

3. How do you envision the process of discussion about it? Are changes intended?

4. What is the intended goal of the Appeal? Are you imagining a kind of “International of social movements” and how is this to be realised concretely in view of the diversity you always refer to, and under the aspects of horizontality and participation?

And now to the content:

5. You place your appeal in the tradition of Bandung, a conference of undoubted significance held in 1954, primarily among representatives of governments and parties. How is this framework compatible with the WSF, in whose basic principles it is stated that “Representatives of parties or military organizations may not participate in the forum”?
But wasn’t a declaration written at Bandung at the end of the conference instead of at the beginning?

6. You excuse your “outdated diction”. Words stand for ideas and these are to be integrated into theoretical concepts. Don’t you also mean that you refer to theoretical concepts of the 50s to 80s with this diction, which are precisely those being questioned critically at the WSF?
Don't you intend a return to the avant garde role of certain intellectuals through your choice of words and also through the drafting process (discussion by only a few)?
And wouldn’t that be in direct contradiction to the idea of the WSF as a forum of social movements coming from the grassroots?

7. In the context an additional question to Ch. II “For a Reorganization of the Global Economic System” (see 1, below for the original title)
Why do you speak so often in the chapter about working groups of “expert researchers” (Point c), “study of the structures of capitalist property” (d), “education for journalists” (e) and mention activists in point f only in connection with Internet sites for progressive economists? I don’t want to question their importance, but weren’t there also others at the forums? Didn’t you become acquainted there with people from social movements who have been questioning the property system practically for a long time, such as, for example, the Argentinian Piqueteros, factory occupiers and actors in a new solidarity economy, landless people who often had to take their land through force, even under Lula, and all the others who have to struggle daily to get just to survive, thus risking their lives like today in Colombia, Haiti and other regions not in Latin America?

8. And so I arrive at one of my central questions directed to you:
Who are the actors for another world of which we all dream? You use the concepts “people”, “working classes” (in a precarious period, extreme unemployment and continual growth of the informal sector) or of a “new historical subject”. Who do you really mean?
Didn’t you meet any people or groups at the WSFs that could be named concretely, such as for example, Bolivian indigenas in the struggle for their water, José Bove and his friends with their fiery methods against the spread of genetically manipulated seeds, or all those who caused the fall of the FTAA?

9. Did I read correctly when I found in your text as the main addressee for another world again and again “nations and peoples”? And this is a further, central and also very concrete question directed to you:
How am I to understand the following sentence in Ch. II? “Our epoch is dominated by the imposition of competition among workers, nations and peoples.” (Original quote, see 2 below) Why don’t you even mention the capital side, above all the transnationals? Or a little later: “Neo-liberal policies…also deny the autonomy of nations and peoples, necessary to the correction of inequalities…. The diversity of nations and of peoples produced by history, demands the affirmation of their autonomy.” (Original quote, see 3 below)
Didn’t you participate in all the debates about the changed roles of national states in the epoch of globalized Capitalism? We, who come more or less from the tradition of the Socialist International, a movement which always rejected national boundaries and set itself to destroy them, are today – where the opposition negates these boundaries whenever it serves their interests in utilisation – suddenly supposed to put our hopes in the national states as an allegedly equalizing power between irreconcilable contradictions?

10. And so I come to the question of how you want to realize another world. Why do you use down-playing verbs in this context, such as “must reject”, “no longer tolerable”, “give it the place it deserves”, “sensitise the movements”, “they should stop”, “prohibit”, “must be ended”, “we should demand”, “should be implemented”…. or “the states must…. guarantee”? And so I come to the core of my question: Why do you speak so much about laws, state and supra national regulations or organizations, and report so little about actions and figures from the grass roots, or even about those interested parties who - even if one imputes goodwill from the governments - prevent these from passing or implementing the laws that you request, which aren’t even that new?
In Ch V on peasant agriculture you don’t explain why President Lula, in spite of the best intentions, was hardly able to improve the situation of the landless and the extreme hunger in his country, while at the international level he was well able to represent the interests of the Brazilian agro-industry against those of the campesinos.

11. Why do you continue to use concepts that are being questioned in a very differentiating manner by the WSF process? By this I mean, for example, “technical progress”, “growth”, “power”? Why don’t you transfer your own realisation in Ch. V about the remoteness of the governments of India and Brazil from the interests of their own small farmers at the WTO in Hong Kong to your general view of this planet, and instead hang onto an outdated North-South scheme? As though there had never been a debate about the losers and winners of globalization in the North as in the South. And the East, and I mean the post communist countries, doesn’t even come up?
How are the people, for example, who are unemployed and in precarious situations in my Northern country to act according to a strategy proposed by you in Ch. II: “Fifty years after the Bandung Conference, the Bamako Appeal calls for the rebuilding of a peoples’ front of the South able to hold in check both the imperialism of dominant economic powers and U.S. military hegemony.” Correctly, you qualify this in the following: “Such an anti-imperialist front would not put the peoples of the South gainst those of the North. On the contrary, it would constitute the basis of a global internationalism bringing them all together in the building of a common civilisation in its diversity”. Excuse me, but can this passage be anything more than the intention to paste-over the contradictions that arise from your own global perspective, which is based on national states?

12. And now one last question to you from my not-yet-exhausted catalogue of questions: What does your declaration have to do with Africa? The name and date of the WSF in Bamako, that is clear, but what significance does your paper have for Africa? I’ll refrain from listing the few, extremely unconcrete passages. Couldn’t you have written this paper in any other place in the world?
And what did it really have to do with the people and the numerous events at the Forum? With whom and where did you discuss it at the Forum?

As a participant at several WSFs, lastly also in Caracas, very different problems occur to me, and I ask myself whether I am alone with them. Here are three of my burning questions, for which I can unfortunately find no answer from you:

1. How can we bring it about that at least a few of the activists who must put themselves on the line daily for another world, and who for the most part have no money and so cannot be present at the Forums, can participate there in the future? Or do you think it is sufficient that those participate who have the flight and hotel paid for by their NGOs or other organizations, or can afford it themselves?

2. Are there at least better opportunities for actively including the local groups and the local people in our debates? (In Caracas the opening demonstration went along the usual route for military parades, flanked by old tanks and generals, near the barracks that houses the Ministry of Defence. During my subsequent visit in the slums, in which approximately 60% of the inhabitants of Caracas live, none of the activists living there had participated in the Forum.)

3. How can we capture the range of experiences and the diversity of our movements, which is palpable at the forums, for other people, make it visible and possibly document it?

4. Many of us, I assume it is the majority, dream of a world without hierarchies. But how do we live and practise horizontality, emancipation, equality, participation, direct democracy and much more, and how do we develop new structures, when we do not want to reproduce hegemonial structures?

At the end there is the question, how does the “Bamako Appeal” help us on the path into this new world?

“This text resulted from an initial, quite controversial debate about the “Bamako Appeal” in the reading circle of the attacCafe Berlin, the discussion among us continues.”